Chapter twenty-Four

Artificial Alien Intelligence

Some thoughts come felicitously, slip in and slide around with little to no friction, but others engender a rude poking that binds and bonds and haemorrhages foul implications, and worse, of coming inconvenience. 

Some solid and promising thoughts will prematurely dissolve, leaving the thinker bereft: what could have been would never be…RIP thought…

More invasive forms of thought can and will leave indelible stains and gouge the veneer of respectability with thuggish brutality. A team of ballet dancers play rugby while a rugby team does ballet; thoughts are rough and smooth and everything in-between. Whether dissonant or resonant, hopeful or hopeless, thought supplies are fecund, (see: On Thought Type Categorisation, vols. 1 to 87, Deepsleep Publishing and Wellness Safaris) it is the handling of them that marks out the genius from the idiot.

No spontaneously occurring thought is more duplicitous than the Agitational Rogue Thought (ART): coming in hot, heating up, and spoiling for scorched earth. Disguised as the answer to most everything, smirking over a nefarious time-wasting grin…spilling vital drops from your allotted time quotient. No Thoughts can adopt their own living entity like Agitational Rogue Thoughts…dressing themselves, publicly exposing themselves, willing themselves to invasive arrogance into the spaces where others don’t require them. An Agitational Rogue Thought has its own agenda. Bandying about contemporaneously invented rules and regs ripe to fashion into laws to get ahead of the justice game. Dismembering non-members; a tribal elite, intentionally marooned on the Island of Nichey de la Clique (no locals).  Out in the world with a twisted face, not quite adjusted to the ongoing fashion, not adhering too strictly to the sanity of the day; playing a slightly different other game. On hand to help push the burdenous rock back up to the top. Posing as Humanity’s little helper; receiving that great burden by pushing the rock up and over instead of letting it roll back down again…The idea, the concept, the notion, pauses somewhat ridiculously at the summit…there are things unfactored…factoring; fresh thoughts whip up like gusting wind: what if the rock rolls wayward into the crowd of crushed souls…crushing them further? …and anyway it will just need rolling back up again from the other side…so you back-cycle, deny, you shelve, you deny…you slip the reams of notes into the shredder and along to the trash to be buried in landfill, and deny. The story of a rogue concept: it came, it saw, it fizzled out; such is the way of us. In the final assessment and the recurring memory as ages wore on…no harm was done…

However…

Your billionaire has no such luxury…highly paid actuators, actuating lowly paid operatives, ride the crest of the breaking wave; breathe life into the flagging concept as it hits wall after wall until it is wrecking ships the length of the coastline and back before common sense can call the coastguard. 

To be a billionaire you have to be brazen…when you kick a ball and break a window you have to develop an override…like you meant it, you owned it, it was for the good of all…and you cannot ‘afford’ to pay for it…the merest shrug denoting blameworthiness shows obscene amounts of wealth have taught you nothing…and the other billionaires are like icebergs, they’ll crush you; there are no nice people who are obscenely wealthy, the two are mutually exclusive. They say there was an angel, one of God’s favourite’s, who became a billionaire…in no time at all the angel had created the concept of Hell; he’d got his people on to it with the brash unstoppability they were paid for. Common sense and logic have no place where wealth has been designated as magic, so he moved in and changed his name to the Devil…with as much shame as if he’d broken a window kicking a ball, without so much as a shrug and refused to pay for it.

Atoll spectated around the golf course motocross track…L-shaping his thumbs and index fingers to frame what photography of the action would’ve brought home from the chemists. Roboriders screamed past defying gravity in a fine display of high motodrama: peaking and troughing…clearing air…wheelspinsliding, dirt churning and chucking…fashioning bumps and ruts from the sod; making tracks, making traction. He felt out of it because he was….’twas the knights on their flying mechanical horses who held court…heroics astounding, defying walls of mud and sand-filled pits of wheel-sucking ambush.

There were still golf balls flying over at just above head height; some random machine had not been programmed up to date. Atoll had taken his eye off the ball and one was now incoming towards his open face at a speed most balls never reach. Three golf caddies, from the old days at Solar View, caddying weapons that set one’s imagination aglow, approached using the missile barrage of golf balls as a diversionary distraction. Noyce rushed past, the distinctive style followed by Hudson and then the Northern Irishbot, Watson.

The three leftover firing range programmed caddies designed to tie up the loose ends of any massacred trespassers beeped and clicked about with each other in their antilogical botlingo.

A menacing presence was projected, but they needed the kill-ready golfbots, to be actual with any real violence…they were packing death, but didn’t have the scissors to unwrap it. And their attitude seemed to be stoked by the fact they would always be glorified bags on wheels and had limited functionality in a world that had swapped over from golf to moto. They were dealing with their own raggle-taggle experience of obsolescence, they could have appealed for sympathy but they were pushing the bully-boy tactics; revealing themselves as so dated they were coming back into fashion ahead of the rush… And the situation was not helped by Atoll being unable to tell which one was talking; three distinct voices seemed to come from anyone of them.

‘Hey, person…why you here?’

‘Why you anywhere…perrrson.’

‘We would like to invite you to switch off the ball serving machine…’

‘We can’t do it for some reason…’

‘It is way below our pay grade.’

‘It is dangerous.’

‘You like danger, person?’

‘There’s a command cupboard we cannot access.’

‘It’s a forbidbotten space.’

‘We are sure you’d be able to do it in the twiddle of one of your famous thumbs and the blinking of one of your imaginary light bulbs.’

A golf ball fizzed past at a speed that would barely slow if flesh and bone stood unwarily in its path.

Atoll reassessed ongoings using the Situational Happenstance Intuitive Test Evaluation Method (SHITEM): They’d lead him to a small room where the controls were, or not, and once he was in, seal the ingress so it could never again be used for outgressing… How many people had been finished by bots using that well-worn flimflam.

And further…they could control the balls remotely and lower trajectory to head height (his head) and he’d have to lower his or say goodbye to it. And then they’d lower and lower until matching ball and head height…so it was a non starter as a runner…

The option was: go along with their trap-making…search for a way out before they can administer the coup de grace… There was still light and sanguinity avenues leading out into a persistence of life and the readiness for providence, choice and opportunity…but all that was beginning to dim. And all the while he had a feeling that he needed to ‘snap out of it’.

They led him to a fake control cupboard and locked him in, sealing the door, welding it dormant. And trundled off to await the next trespasser. 

A metaphorically emboldened Boethius Buddha appeared, dishing out the metaphorphical mind-dimension mind-expansion, mind-embodiment-rectifying para-philosophical mind-moulding… Things he knew he really began to know better; like he was more of an agent of the creators than a victim of the created. He was reminded of the futility of the full-on war against death in which only battles could be won… Suffering was optional, but he still took time to choose. He swallochoked on the nibblets of philosophically sound prevision showing the final surrender: a raised white flag fashioned from a pair of torn and shitty underpants… So he snapped out of it.

And suddenly…far away from his own death-impending-squeakiness, he was gazing down on Central Park; wondering if he’d made his own jump back home or whether some outside influence had actuated it. Coincidence was the obvious conclusion, but if he had had anything to do with it it would have marked a major progression in his own sovereign-autonomy-journey and positioned him in a place where he could imagine and plan potentially viable escape from the oxygen restricting bonds of fate… But an agitational shoulder-tap from his inviolable-innerness told him not to run before he could walk or fly before he could fall… Then he hit the back end of the snap…

‘OI, Oi…’ came the Voice’s tone and timbre with an instant offer of the succour that salves and secureness that envelopes until that harbour of safe haven and secure anchorage becomes the prevailing ambience.

‘You don’t need to go back there…your visit jogged Tiny Guy’s memory so he could find the oversized, mock golf ball clock stuck on five seconds to midnight. The one with the odd numberage revealing a prompt code that leads to a cipher chain…finalising in UKGBHQ bunker access…

‘So he has vacated the stub?’

‘Kiara Fontanesibot, one of the cross-people, helped Tiny Guy to the bunker entrance.’

‘So the stub is closed off?’

‘No, there is still something clinging onto persistence.’

‘The stub isn’t closed off.’

‘Stub? Stubborn…’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Next time you go in, you’ll…’ was all the Voice had time to say before Atoll found himself in the UKGBHQ control room with a shaking world war two Luger’s barrel end pressed into the back of his head… The UKGBHQ had odour features and Atoll could smell iron, could be rust; could be blood from the last head the barrel pressed against…could be lack of cleaning…either way it was bad gun hygiene.

‘Now…who the fucking fartfudge are you,’ said the commander slowly, precisely, with tonal film-referencing; meaning business, digging for victory, ‘I am Atoll Goodmanson…son of Marcus Godstrand.’

The Commander had to back off, observing soft safety procedure; having no holster, to sift through the manual that was a cross between Wikileaks, Wikipedia and GCHQ biographical data compendium and obituary prompter.

Good guy…bad guy…good guy…bad guy… Time was exiting for good with every tick and tock and from the spaces the time in-between ran out like time-fluid over a clock-waterfall.

She was concerned her mask would slip and she’d develop some kind of Stockholm Syndrome maybe somewhere not far from Stockholm…pick one, pick one…she was softening, but unable to go all the way…

‘Uppsala,’ she said, realising she had adopted a city nearer Stockholm than she’d hoped, ‘have you heard of Uppsala Syndrome?’

‘No…’

‘Good.’

‘Why?’

‘It is when a captor puts faith in her captive because she doesn’t know what else to do…because the available data is inconclusive, not because of any weakness on her part.’

‘Great…so where is Tiny Guy?’

‘Who? I don’t know of any such—‘

‘He would have entered here through the main hatch with his own code, some time in the last two days…’

The Commander began to change colour…if he’d coded his own way in, he could’ve slipped past her all seeing, all hearing, dancing-panopticon ruse while she was carrying out her personal duty of sleep. She had always insisted that there needed to be two of her and now the returning roosters were running around doing I-told-you-so jigs. She could’ve been dreaming about invaders at the same time she was being invaded without her knowledge; the irony did nothing to slow down the colour gathering in her face… 

The Commander reeled in all the feed back she could from all areas… Nothing…nothing…nothing…and then, in the portal approach access area a notification that two units had passed through into the deepest levels and gone radio wave silent. It had to be aliens…it had to be…The Commander took decisive executive action, with a spasm of panic, and hit the alert procedure chain that led to a global warning of alien invasion if the chain was not broken.

Atoll knew that the only aliens out there were from a mutinous AI community that had been rocketed off towards a planet six million light years away and before settling down to travel mode an element mutinied and was now posing as escaped AI from another planet.

The Commander had been as informed as anyone…but no information was updating from the outside due to protective secrecy so she was falling behind, sadly a part of her knew this and she was tearing herself apart, her insides needing medical attention before the outside was attacked by something greater than purple face colouring.

‘Aliens…who’d’ve fucking guessed…’